Is this a fair deal?

Ripper · 23 May 2013 at 22:16

A company have quoted £3500 for a new website to advertise our business. It will include 28 pages, a drupal CMS, hosting, after sales support, staff training and the design of an App.

I won't go into major detail on the quote or business but does it seem a little steep to anyone else? I've done a little research and found another company doing something similar for £2500 but aside from that not many companies will reveal prices without going through a long-winded discussion which I don't currently have time for.

Feedback welcomed!

FrenchTart · 23 May 2013 at 22:35

Doesn't sound that steep to me. Not massively different from what I would've charged when doing freelance work.

Unless all you're getting is a CMS and theme installation of course.

BFCTom · 23 May 2013 at 23:05

Doesn't seem that expensive at all if it's a bespoke design/theme.

dmsims · 24 May 2013 at 01:16

When you an App - does that mean for Iphone?

If so why would you want to limit your market ? (or is it internal?)

AJK · 24 May 2013 at 08:47

£3500 sounds cheap to be honest.

peterwalkley · 24 May 2013 at 10:48

Ripper said:
.... aside from that not many companies will reveal prices without going through a long-winded discussion which I don't currently have time for.

How would the bidders know what you want if you don't have time to tell them. It is impossible to estimate, so anyone giving you a price is either going to con you or is too stupid to know what they are getting into.

gord · 24 May 2013 at 11:10

I would echo the comments above. You don't have time for the most important part of the project? You should have a detailed spec of everything so that the suppliers who tender a) can provide an accurate price and b) don't build some random ****.

Did they give you a price breakdown? The website elements would come in at £1k I'd estimate, depending on your support/training requirements. You should primarily be paying for the app which we have no details about so £2.5k might be great or horrendous.

rsatd · 24 May 2013 at 11:34

AJK said:
£3500 sounds cheap to be honest.

Very cheap mate.

Company I work for uses proprietary cms, our prices START from 8,000 for a cms + support for a basic nothing custom. If you want something that we don't do, its fine but it will cost way more.

They use Drupal and from the sounds of things will even create 28 pages for you. From your old site I guess.

What you have to take into account here is how custom their drupal deployment will be. So they spent time most likely developing plugins for drupal to make it do certain things that you guys might want. spent development time coming up with a configuration of it that works (I hope). And will host it for you so you essentially got nothing to worry about.

So how big is that company? They will no doubt have at least one developer, most likely a dedicated designer, project manager to manage this and other projects, sales guys who sold this deal to you... How many days of work did the project involve between minimum of 4 people in a medium size CMS provider? And this is BEFORE designs for a mobile app!

Only way to get this lower is to go to private developers rather then a company. If its a bog standard website and you can do your own hosting + backups you can most likely get some developer/designer to do it for a few hundred. But how much more would you trust a random developer or a company that has been in business for x number of years (I hope they have history)

tldr; making a website is easy if you do everything yourself, what you guys are doing is paying some other people to do it for you

Ripper · 24 May 2013 at 19:46

Thanks for the feedback guys, just wanted to make sure it wasn't overly expensive which it seems its not.

kaku · 25 May 2013 at 04:09

On the contrary, it sounds suspiciously cheap.

Limenote · 25 May 2013 at 13:40

AJK said:
£3500 sounds cheap to be honest.

agree'd, that's a lot of work for not a lot of cash.